The Cybersecurity Priority Research Program and Equipment (PEPR) unveiled as part of the National Cybersecurity Strategy in February 2021 has just been unveiled the first seven projects who will articulate it over the next few months. Protection of personal data, verification of security protocols, or defense against malicious programs, these projects cover a wide perimeter in terms of cybersecurity.
What is PEPR Cybersecurity?
In September 2020, former Prime Minister Jean Castex presented the France Relance plan, a program put in place by the government with the aim of reviving the French economy after having suffered the full brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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As part of this plan, the fourth investment program for the future (PIA4) was presented and is based on two components: the first provides for an investment of 7.5 billion euros to help establishments in higher education, research and innovation created and developed through previous PIAs. The second provides for an investment of 12.5 billion euros to help around fifteen key markets whose development must be accelerated and massively funded “.
It is around this second component that the PEPR Cybersecurity falls, a program aimed at supporting research in the field of cybersecurity. Led in particular by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Inria and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and involving 22 other partners, universities and colleges, the Cybersecurity PEPR has 65 million euros over 6 years.
As Gildas Avoine, professor at INSA Rennes and pilot for the CNRS of this PEPR, indicates, ” approximately 200 researchers in computer science, mathematics, electronics and signal processing will get involved to focus on cryptography and data security, hardware or digital systems, software and networks “.
Seven targeted projects to develop the cybersecurity sector in France
On June 21, 2021, seven projects were presented at an event at the Cyber Campus in Paris. They were targeted using a process that involved the National Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI), the Alliance for Digital Sciences and Technologies (Allistene), the Conference of Directors of French Schools of Engineers (CDEFI), the Conference of University Presidents (CPU), and Udice, an association of French research universities.
Here are the first seven projects that will articulate the cybersecurity PEPR:
- The IPoP project, piloted by Inria. This is an interdisciplinary project on the protection of personal data to design techniques to protect user data while ” de-anonymizing ”, that is to say, remove their protections.
- The SecureCompute Project, piloted by ENS PSL. Its objective is to carry out calculations or storage in a cloud without revealing information about the data in question, all in a secure way and with the help of cryptography.
- The SVP Project, piloted by the CNRS. This project will analyze the security of cryptographic protocols to improve the analysis maturity of these protocols so that they are safe and flawless.
- The DefMal project, piloted by the University of Loraine. By working on the knowledge and understanding of malicious programs, researchers wish to develop countermeasures to defend against these malwares.
- The Supervise project, piloted by Inria. To protect companies’ computer systems, this project focuses on strengthening preventive protection mechanisms in order to overcome their shortcomings.
- The Arsene project, piloted by the CEA. This project focuses on the hardware security of processors used in embedded computing, which have little computing capacity and few resources, and therefore fewer security options.
- The SECUREVAL project, piloted by the CEA. The objective will be to work in a coordinated and structured way to accelerate the research and development of sovereign and industrializable security solutions.
PEPR Cybersecurity is already thinking about the future since it wishes to finance three additional projects which will focus on three different themes: protection of multimedia data, research and techniques for exploiting vulnerabilities, and cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives.
In addition to cybersecurity, France has taken the lead in investing massively for the development of the cloud in France (up to 1.8 billion euros), for industrial sovereignty or more generally for technological innovation within the framework of the investment plan France 2030.